A verse in the Bible says God commanded the ancient Israelites to "utterly destroy" the Canaanites, among other peoples. And the disappearance of the the latter group from history suggested some truth to the story.

"The Canaanites, unlike most other ancient Near Easterners of this period, left few surviving textual records and thus their origin and relationship to ancient and present-day populations remain unclear," reads the study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

DNA retrieved from roughly 3,700-year-old skeletons at an excavation site in Lebanon that was formerly a major Canaanite city-state shows that "present-day Lebanese derive most of their ancestry from a Canaanite-related population, which therefore implies substantial genetic continuity in the Levant since at least the Bronze Age."

The Canaanite-related ancestry mixed with other populations in the Near East beginning around 6,600 years ago and arrived in the Levant around 2,170 to 3,750 years ago, according to the study.